A place for a tired old woman to try to figure things out so that the world makes a bit of sense.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Meddling

One of the earliest clues that our country was in for a really rocky ride under the Bush administration came shortly after 9/11 when then Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was asked about the trouble Bill Maher was in for some comments he made about the bravery of the criminals who drove planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Here is what Mr. Fleischer said on 9/26/01:

...they're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.

The threat was clear. It was time to dispense with the Bill of Rights. We needed to fall in line.

I was reminded of that statement yesterday when I was perusing the articles over at Watching America. The US is still making threats, thinly veiled though they may be.

This time the memory was evoked by another case of the State Department inserting itself into Middle Eastern affairs. Needless to say, those countries were not pleased by the threat implicit in a State Department statement, if this editorial in the United Arab Emirates' Gulf News is any indication.

The US, in a threatening tone, has called on Arab states to think carefully when it comes to attending or boycotting the upcoming Arab League summit, which is to be held in Syria at the end of this month. Controversy has been surrounding the summit due to the presidential crisis in Lebanon. ...

But the issue at hand is not whether Arab leaders should or should not attend the summit. It is a sovereign right of the leadership of each nation to decide on that. The US is in no way party to the dealings of the Arab League. In fact, the position that has been taken by the American administration on the matter and the warning it has issued complicates the situation further. The countries that were perhaps hesitant in reaching a final decision would by now have recognised the intimidation, and the countries that had decided not to attend the summit would be seen as bowing to American pressure. If the US is incapable of finding peaceful means to resolving problems, it should just stay away from dictating orders and issuing threats. [Emphasis added]

Seven years later, and this administration is still engaging in diplomacy-by-threat, and it is no more successful now than it was at the start. Oh, we may have bombed two countries into smithereens, killed hundreds of thousands of innocents and lost nearly 4,000 American soldiers and Marines in the process, but we have accomplished nothing. The Global War On Terror, a sham from the beginning, has succeeded only in making us the object of the deepest scorn and has made our security even less, well, secure.

1 Comments:

Remember the end of the Cold War, when peace threatened to break out and we talked about a peace dividend? The first President Bush put an end to that. His son perfected the idea of waging a Forever War, misleadingly called a war on terror. It's been five years, and the fog of war that settled over our nation has never really lifted. Public opinion has turned against the war without really turning toward peace. We're still wandering around, lost in the fog, while the madness continues.